Monday, July 1, 2013

Austrian artist Christian Bazant-Hegemark (www.bazant-hegemark.com), whose work will be presented in his first solo show in the USA, at Seattle's Form/Space Gallery on July 12th, 2013. The artist has previously shown his work in solo shows in Europe and beyond, including Leipzig, Paris, Rio de Jane...iro, Vienna, Düsseldorf and others.

The upcoming exhibition will showcase the work that was produced during his residence in Seattle. It will be accompanied by a limited-edition catalogue of the artist’s work.

About the show:

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The collection of paintings completed during the Wolfram residency in Seattle, WA, offers a dystopian take on current affairs, unfolding a variety of unforeseen events - uncanny scenarios connected by their sparse use of figuration. The works present sombre fragments: The loosely dangling empty flag missing its stars, a crash-landing site, a tornado, a scenery of Disneyland-inspired flora where a dirty dove spins away from mail boxes turned pandorian. A post-industrialized, haggard, old man harvesting a plant of boolean descent on an infinite plane of three-colored, rothkoesque flatness, watched by the cipher of a fully-lipped, potentially homoerotic dark angel pondering the proceedings in apathy. A white-winged chimpanzee, floating in an undefined black void, connecting with a prism's light..

On their route from the everyday to the surreal, the paintings continuously open their formal vocabulary and range of action to reflect various American painting topics and tendencies while also becoming a statement about today's use of figuration per se. These works employ paraphrasing of painters like Rothko or Guston, usage of US specific, internationally understood symbolisms like Old Glory, KKK paraphernalia, the Mickey Mouse silhouette and others. The symbolized depiction of highly relevant themes include the recent publications regarding the NSA's Prism program - whose logo's rainbow color gradient, more commonly used as the symbol for LGBT pride, serves as the connecting theme throughout all pieces.

The work’s colors incorporate a sense of dread that might be typical of an outsider view of the U.S., and its epitomal status primus inter pares of western civilization, where constitutionally guaranteed rights are frequently morphed into or reduced to temporary privileges, and freedom becomes a volatile state to be granted or withheld - while at the same time allowing for basic criticism like the one offered with the show's work.

The paintings thus become multifaceted vectors of both painting's possibilities in general, and of our time more specifically. Vectors of materialized paint, whose distinct spectral palette dives deeply into the American dystopian subconscious, visually pre-thought by the likes of David Lynch, Gregory Crewdson or David LaChapelle - each known for their individual approach and mastery to create unique atmosphères noires.

Victoria Jang received her BFA in Ceramics at the University of Washington.

She is currently residing in the Bay area, attaining her MFA at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

The primary focus of my work is the exploration of a family unit’s psyche. This exploration is achieved through the creation of simplified anthropomorphic forms with illusory surfaces, forms with starkly differentiated shells that flatten their ostensibly three dimensional structure. The whiteness of the eyes, teeth, and any body cavity appears wholly negative next to the saturated and pigmented surfaces that encompass these features.

I appropriate the cultural roles within each member of my family and displace them as singular entities to emphasize the fragility of the human condition.

The work illuminates certain aspects of the human experience that are inherent to all people. These aspects that generate the emotional hub of the work are instability, vulnerability, and isolation. The visceral blackness and shapeless forms within the work are associated with these mental states and are difficult to poignantly express; consequently, they are not introduced to the viewer boldly. These psychological binds must be expressed through ambiguity of aesthetic and conceptual masking. By employing the mechanisms of humor and humility along with the aforementioned contrast of form, the untainted surfaces attract and command the viewer’s attention, creating a conduit to the darker emotional truths at the core of the work.

Exposing and illuminating these negative emotions may seem like a bleak proposal, but the veracity of their presence among all people is unquestionable, and consequently, worthy of analysis. And although this body of work was developed through my personal relationships, this way of exploration and confronting difficult elements of human experience can be understood universally.

We are all trying to search for a connection not only with other people but with ourselves.